Detroit squatter markets in everything

It’s no joke. In a remote pocket of northwest Detroit along the Rouge River, neighbors are so desperate to stop a cycle of abandonment and blight they’re recruiting a squatter to occupy a home whose longtime owners left last weekend.

That’s because neighbors fear the onetime farmhouse on Puritan and Hazelton will be stripped and torched if it remains empty for long. Eight nearby houses burned in the past two years. A few blocks away, there are more weedy lots than homes.

A co-founder of one neighborhood group explained:

“You want someone in the house when it’s still functioning. Otherwise, it will be destroyed in 24 hours.”

In this case the homeowners are asking potential squatters for references, so as to avoid drug dealer squatters. How about some Syrian squatters?

Technically, squatting in Detroit is against the law but it is often tolerated. But not all settlement attempts pass legal muster:

“The over-arching theme is that the city of Detroit does nothing, so we’re forced to do our own thing,” said Brown, 34, a Wayne County Community College professor.

Brown also made headlines last year. That’s when she and her husband, David, bought a $2,000 house in the neighborhood in hopes of forming a kibbutz, a Jewish communal settlement. City officials seized backyard goats and charged the couple with violating ordinances.

What would Coase say? They aren’t just buying the properties and paying taxes and for security guards because it’s cheaper to rent a squatter and the odds of legal problems are negligible? Obviously they can coordinate enough to rent the squatter, so that’s not the problem.

And, well, Detroit is already settled, with millions of productive people in the greater metropolitan area. It’s just that they don’t want to live within the city limits, even if the real estate is practically free.

“They aren’t just buying the properties and paying taxes and for security guards because it’s cheaper to rent a squatter and the odds of legal problems are negligible?”

Yeah, I think that’s basically it. It just seems strange because the market value of the property is so low: if the building were unoccupied, it would have negative value to the neighborhood, but it’s also not worth securing. Actually buying it would be a waste of money for any individual, *especially* if the titular owners are aware of a potential buyer’s willingness to pay to avoid the negative externalities caused by vacancy. So they basically just hire a groundskeeper, with de facto living quarters as payment.

What a brilliant idea. Take marginalized Syrians and place them in an unstable, violent environment. Certainly the synergy of Syrian refugees and Detroit culture will make for a generation of easygoing, peaceful people.

Mostly Christian Arabs, fleeing the terror wrought by their Muslim neighbors. It’s like saying circa 1945 that we could resettle Germans fleeing the Red Army in lower Manhattan because of Schwartzes and Steins who live there.

Have you been to Dearborn? I am sure there are some Christian Arabs but most are Muslim.

Fordson High School’s players were observed Ramadan during football season – they practiced 10pm-2am in the summer/fall and then were usually able to break fast during halftime. Dearborn is also home to the largest mosque in North America, the Islamic Center of America.

(Dearborn is the suburb immediately east of Detroit – many of the Arab population have moved across the border into West Detroit. Story I heard was that Mayor Hubbard of Dearborn woo’d the Arabs to East Dearborn in the 1960s as a racial buffer between the blacks of Detroit and the whites of West Dearborn.)

I can’t think Detroit is worse than a large part, if not all of Syria at the moment. It might not be great, but it’d be an upgrade.

As Hoosier notes, there’s a large Arab population in the area, which definitely makes it easier. Beyond that, think of the benefits for Detroit: it gets an influx of people, which helps with sucking up otherwise wasted homes and land, who turn into customers at its businesses and expand the tax base. It’d be a lot cheaper, I’d guess, than some sort of direct transfer of funds.

Are they the ones who would apply for an American visa? I’d think that anyone truly “indoctrinated by radical Islamic thought and unsocialized to western values” would want to stay in Syria and kill somebody.

Very sad. I suppose the motive for the squatter is to avoid the property taxes that would come with buying for nearly nothing a similar house out of foreclosure? Do these squatters get power, running water, waste removal? That would seem very important.

I trust the Arabs who were enterprising enough to walk across half a continent to be smart enough to make Detroit livable again. A lot of them are educated and ambitious. As for the native homeless, unless disabled (physically or mentally) or suffering from some freak hardship, they have no excuse for ending up homeless in the land of plenty (no irony). Even giving them free real estate in Detroit wouldn’t help them. We need enterprising squatters.

I understand that Jeb Bush wishes to remove the dark-skinned squatters in the White House who moved in after his brother abandoned the place. “You want someone in the house when it’s still functioning”, said Mr. Bush. Someone, like my brother, who “kept us safe”, he added.

We could mimic this without letting any Syrians in. Just to make sure it works.

We could make Food Stamps and Disability conditional on living in Detroit.

It would have two great effects. 1. It would provide the warm bodies that Detroit obviously needs and 2. it would free up a lot of potentially very valuable real estate in places like Brooklyn and Oakland.

Sounds like a win-win. Admittedly I don’t think people are fungible. I don’t think that more of the sort of voters that created Detroit’s mess are going to help. Nor do I think that the sort of people who created Syria’s mess will help either. The sort of people who made Grosse Point Grosse Point is what Detroit needs. But isn’t going to get. Detroit certainly won’t get them if you encourage a million people whose religion tells them 9 year old girls are acceptable for marriage to move there. Not after Rotherham.

The only realistic path to improvement in Detroit is an aggressive police campaign to jail as many criminals for as long as possible. Followed by encouraging business back into the city. Followed by encouraging Gays and young couples with no children to move back in to the center of town. The kibbutz is probably not a bad first step. Ask the Gays of the Netherlands how safe it is to walk in large Dutch cities these days.

I trust the Arabs who were enterprising enough to walk across half a continent to be smart enough to make Detroit livable again. A lot of them are educated and ambitious. As for the native homeless, unless disabled (physically or mentally) or suffering from some freak hardship, they have no excuse for ending up homeless in the land of plenty (no irony). Even giving them free real estate in Detroit wouldn’t help them. We need enterprising squatters.